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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores transformations of mineralogical extraction in northern Chōsen (Korea), between 1910-1945, from an industry rooted in entrepreneurial efforts led by foreign investor, to one enmeshed in the State Capitalist nexus of Imperial Japan and led by enterprises such as Nippon Kogyo.

Paper long abstract:

Mining and Mineral extraction on the Korean peninsula has been vital in developmental and institutional terms throughout Korean history. Gold mining and mining for other precious metals was vital to the Yi dynasty in Chosŏn, and the richness of deposits in the northern areas of its territory following western encroachment and the opening of Korea by Japan in 1876 became hugely important. Ernst Oppert, James Morse of Nebraska and many other adventurers with gold rush experience, flocked to the peninsula. Companies such as the Oriental and Occidental Development Company and Morse’s American Oriental Mining created something of a developmental boom in Korea the three decades before 1910, foreign Capital, and an entrepreneurial animal spirit transforming the landscapes and terrains of Korean mines at Unsan and Musan into vital places of extraction and accumulation. The annexation of Korea in 1910, meant that eventually such foreign and Korean efforts and enterprises would be co-opted and assimilated into the Japanese Imperial project by the Chōsen Government General and other agencies – though that assimilation would take time, American Oriental Mining at Unsan generated so much funds for the Government General that it lasted in American ownership til 1941. This paper explores the transformation of such spaces of mining and mineralogical extraction from those of enterprising and ambitious foreigners and local interests, to ones enmeshed and vital to the State Capitalism of Imperial Japan. The paper explores the institutional and legal reconfigurations undertaken by the Government General in order to make mining efforts more practical, productive and research focused in Chōsen, and for their outputs to flow more coherently and seamlessly into the wider Imperial market. In particular the paper considers efforts at Syozyo and Suian, mines owned by Nippon Kogyo, a predecessor of ENEOS holdings, and their reconfiguration into modern mining operations which fed the Japanese Empire with not only gold and coal, but also rarer elements such as Wulfenite and Molybdenum, important to weapons research prior to 1945, but which as ores from which Rare Earths and Uranium can be extracted, continued to be of interest after the colonial period's end.